also, just one more thing to add. i feel like the people who would call or did call me a whiny jerk assume something that i don't think is really fair: that employers compare apples to apples when they look at all law students and that where you ended up is a proxy for your intelligence/potential to do well in the law to start with. but the fact is (even assuming such a thing is measurable ex-ante), it's impossible for the law school selection process to perfectly sort qualified candidates, given financial aid packages, lifestyle preferences, etc., not to mention the lsat/gpa combo is an imperfect proxy for savvy in legal practice, or that it accounts for potential across many areas of law, etc., etc.

ubersmart people obviously end up at "less competitive" schools. so, even if you allow for the sake of argument that perhaps everyone "prefers" oranges to apples, a rotten orange is still going to look way worse than a good apple, even if, were both items were in a race, the orange would have beaten the pants off the apple. (and that's a a REALLY big "even if," because at the end of the day, that scenario probably proves false more often than it holds true.)

hopefully that makes sense. at a minimum, just more fodder for the whole "law school situations are, at least on some level, completely arbitrary" argument.

hey, thanks. i hope i don't have a crappy personality. at least my gazillions of friends don't think so. anyway, prob ny, since i know dc's harder to break...have ties to both. we'll see i guess. i really didn't mean to come off as whiny or insensitive. i'm honestly just concerned. at the end of the day, bottom of the pack anywhere makes you seem like...bottom of the pack. it's all relative.

well, i have my suspicions, but i don't actually know until i see the sample answers. i'll pm it to you.

and it was actually volokh, not prawfs, sorry:

http://volokh.com/posts/1138056460.shtml#56467 was one of them, and i'm having trouble finding one that basically intimated the idea that across a number of grades, consistent mediocrity is noticed. i'll also pm that to you if/when i find it.

and no, i have not considered chasing ambulances. with that, i'll probably call it a night on this topic. thanks for the research. hopefully i can sleep my way into some decent firm.

yep, he got me. i actually think i am, by virtue of the name on my degree, 1000x smarter than everyone posting on this board who's not at HYS, and i'm just looking for someone to stroke my ego.

i think goalie summed it up. frankly, i have no idea where that gpa. puts me. they don't disclose the curve; if they did, maybe I wouldn't be asking. if our career services posted stats, maybe i wouldn't be asking. but for all i know, i'm in the bottom 10%. i've been told stories by HLS alums who sat down at interviews and had the interviewer stare blankly back at them because their grades were below some cutoff the ER had imposed. no one ever talks about how the "bottom 40%" do in interviews or clerkships...they discuss what the better grades will get you, and I just don't have them. i don't think the managing partner of any big DC firm is going to be banging down my door like they would if I had A+'s (yes, we have those), and i'm not going to invent some fiction just so I can sleep at night.

i never said "woe is me; life sucks," but, frankly, i think it's kind of demoralizing to anyone--no matter if you're a rhodes scholar or at community college--to try something, fail to meet your expectations (which, in my case, were just to break even with my classmates), try harder, and yet still fell short. it kind of sucks, and all i was looking for was something a little more useful than "you go to harvard; you have absolutely nothing to worry about." i did choose harvard so that this excruciating job-search process is--i can only hope--less excruciating. i wish it were less excruciating for everyone. but i hope that alone doesn't mean i'm somehow not entitled to the same genre of concern about my career as everyone else.

i think it's pretty fair to wonder if you're going to get blank stares at interviews or if you won't be taken seriously by skadden et al. believe it or not, even at harvard, there's (almost a passive-aggressive brand of) competition for good summer internships and jobs. the whole class wants a federal clerkship. harvard's class size is huge. i just read a huge prawfblog thread about how grades reflect on a student when there's, ahem, little variation. and my friends are sending me emails about the slowing economy.

i'm a rising HLS 2L with a relatively crappy grade situation. grades came back, and, with no fabulous excuses, my 1L gpa equates to about a 3.1 on a B+ curve. nothing lower than a B, but obviously nothing much higher either. bummed b/c 2nd semester was pretty much the same (so no marked improvement to boast, either).

can anyone speak to what I can expect at fall OCI? be honest, but gentle. thanks.

Seriously, go @#!* yourself.

Dude, don't be that guy. Almost everyone worries about their grades, no matter where they are. It doesn't mean they don't appreciate where they are, or don't recognize that they're still in a good position. This is legitimate question, and one that's hard to figure out without input from other people (I know I'm feeling pretty hazy about how OCI actually works, myself).

Even if this guy went to Boalt or NYU I might empathize with him. But this dude goes to HARVARD and is around the median. Not bottom 10%. Not bottom 25%. At worst, he is botton 40%. Meaning he beat out about HALF of Harvard's law school class. He knows deep down inside he is beyond solid. He just came here for emotional reassurance.

::shrug::

I'll let OP speak for him or herself here, but I really think you're wrong. When you're surrounded by a bunch of absurdly smart, ambitious, competitive people, below-median can start to feel not good enough, even if rationally you know you'll be okay. This seems like a reasonable place to come try to sort that out.

i'm a rising HLS 2L with a relatively crappy grade situation. grades came back, and, with no fabulous excuses, my 1L gpa equates to about a 3.1 on a B+ curve. nothing lower than a B, but obviously nothing much higher either. bummed b/c 2nd semester was pretty much the same (so no marked improvement to boast, either).

can anyone speak to what I can expect at fall OCI? be honest, but gentle. thanks.

hi...everyone disappoints themselves a few times in their life. you should use this 1L experience to figure out where your strengths might lie. one of my law profs this semester told us a story about one of her colleagues who did horrible on his exams but spent the rest of his law school doing only classes where you could write papers. so you do need to figure something out academically...but in the meantime:

(this is coming from a fellow 1L, so i'm by no means an expert, but this would I do) network your ass off. try and meet people, friends of friends. if your UG gpa is stellar, maybe sneak it back on your resume so ppl will see your academic talents even if they don't lie in the 3-hr, law school exam area. (and I think a lot of current lawyers, if they're merciful, can empathize with having had a rough time 1L year...)

i say go for OCI - you have nothing to lose...you could go in and wow the pants off of them in the interview. make sure you get a LOT out of this year's job and establish some strong recs for your future prospects.

and don't beat yourself up. i also did crappy 1st semester, and i think the best advice was to give yourself a day, two maybe to feel like crap, eat pints of ice cream (what do guys do in these situations?), and move on. you can only go up from here.

reapply. you won't regret the improvement. it can mean the difference between funding/no funding, getting in and not getting in. and it really sounds like you can prep yourself better...BUT, that said, you might want to try and gear up with practice tests now to make sure you can improve...if you see a marked improvement in the practice tests over the next few weeks (maybe with some tutoring/book instruction), it's definitely worth it. for me it was the diff. between being accepted at harvard and, well, having no shot.

if i've understood your question correctly (and i'm not sure whether this is specific to 2nd cycle people), but i do know of initial decisions that were sent out mid-april last year, although i feel like they should mostly be out by the end of march. that said, if you're on a waitlist, i know of people who started hearing as early as mid-june to two weeks before classes started.